2018 School Spending Survey Report
It Jes' Happened
When Bill Traylor Started to Draw
It Jes' Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw. illus. by R. Gregory Christie. 32p. bibliog. notes. photos. CIP. Lee & Low. 2012. RTE $17.95. ISBN 978-1-60060-260-3. LC 2011035353.
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Gr 3–5—This picture-book biography relates events in the life of an artist who started drawing at the age of 85. As a young boy, Traylor picked cotton. His enslaved family survived the aftermath of the Civil War and he worked a farm, all the while recording memories of his family around him, the animals and their antics, and the gatherings within his community. He bravely left his farm at the age of 81 and tried to find work in Montgomery. At the nadir of his life there—unemployed, tired, and lonely—he began to experiment with drawing as he sat quietly on the street. At first he worked only in pencil, but his artist friend Charles Shannon introduced him to paint and he began to develop signature folk images drawn from his past. Using "deep blues, bright reds, sunny yellows, and earth browns…paint straight from the jar and rarely mixed," Traylor captured animals and people from his past in an imaginative and humorous manner. With a warm palette of browns, reds, yellows, and darker tones, Christie echoes the sharp contrasts and simple line of the subject's work; readers are only given a glimpse of Traylor's images. However, the story of this man's life is an introduction to a noted American folk artist of the 20th century, and a refreshing reminder that artistic talent is not limited by age or formal training.—Mary Elam, Learning Media Services, Plano ISD, TXThis picture-book biography describes artist Traylor's life--born into slavery in 1854, he worked as a sharecropper after Emancipation--and how at the age of eighty-five he first began to draw on scraps of cardboard. Christie's own flat primitive style is a perfect match for Traylor's story, but the real artistry here is in Tate's finely crafted account of Traylor's first eighty years.
Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1854 and spent his first eighty years on the same Alabama plantation, working as a sharecropper after Emancipation. Late in life, in 1935, Traylor moved to Montgomery, where he tried to eke out a living selling pencils on the street. For some reason he himself could never explain beyond "It jes’ happened," at the age of eighty-five he began to draw on scraps of cardboard as he sat on a wooden crate on a downtown street. He drew scenes from his life, and his drawing soon attracted the attention of Charles Shannon, a young artist who recognized the value of Traylor’s work and began to supply him with paint, colored pencil, and paper. Shannon also struggled to get Traylor gallery showings and to help him sell his art, but it was not until the 1970s that Traylor was recognized as one of the most talented self-trained artists of the twentieth century. Christie’s own flat primitive style is a perfect match for Traylor’s story, and he deftly uses a second naïve style to represent Traylor’s own art. But the real artistry here is in Don Tate’s finely crafted account of Traylor’s first eighty years; the ordinary events in the life of an ordinary African American man are made notable by Tate’s repetition of the line: "Bill saved up memories of these times deep inside." When these memories later burst into art, they are made all the more meaningful. kathleen t. horning
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